This isn’t really anything new but I did the research all over again so I thought I may as well put it somewhere. There are three English variants of Wonder Boy in Monster Land - a prototype, a Japanese release with English text that would never show, and a final Western release. There are a bunch of differences between them, but the one that entertains me the most is the editing done to the questions the Sphinx asks you, the hints you get and the answers...

Question: what was for dinner yesterday?

Earlier versions: Question: what did I eat yesterday?

Recently, the sphinx seems to be dieting

No dinner

No changes.

Yesterday, one of our chickens disappeared

Fried chicken

In the prototype it says Chicken and rice. However, while that’s a perfectly cromulent thing to have for dinner in the Far East, it’s a crazy thing for Westerners who would rather have some KFC or whatever.

Question: what is my hobby?

Or Question: what is my hobby recently? in earlier versions.

Sphinx has many clubs

Golf

In the earlier versions, the hint is the more entertaining Recently, the sound of window glass breaking was heard.

Sphinx makes strange noises when it rains

Singing

The rain bit always confused me there. In the earlier versions, it’s Recently, it’s so noisy at night with the solution Karaoke or Karaoke singing. I guess people go to karaoke at night, but they saw fit to erase the Karaoke part because Westerners wouldn’t know what it meant? But by 1988, wasn’t Karaoke pretty well-known worldwide?

Question: how do I stay in shape?

In earlier versions: Question: what is the method by which I get rid of stress?

Sphinx has new shoes

Jogging

Earlier versions have the hint Recently, earthquakes occur in the morning. I guess Sphinx is rather heavy-footed?

Sphinx likes green diamonds

Baseball

That means nothing to anyone outside the US, Japan and Korea. They erased Karaoke but added this? Anyway, in earlier versions the focus was not on fitness but relaxing, and how better to do that than by developing cirrhosis of the liver?

The sphinx often visits our bar

DrinkingAlcohol (prototype)

Which game have I been playing recently?

Was I hear that the sphinx easily become sick when riding in a vehicle. The Sphinx seems a bit of a wuss. Was he playing the hydraulic arcade cab, or the less awesome home version? Anyway, perhaps Sega felt it was inappropriate to suggest that one of their games would make you nauseous.

So I was sent a PDF file which was “protected” by a password, which was supposed to be my date of birth in ddmmyyyy format. But that didn’t work, even when I tried various variants of it. I even installed Adobe Reader in case it was some proprietary nonsense (Chrome is my PDF viewer these days). So I emailed them to see what was up.

However, I couldn’t help also wondering whether I could brute-force the password. If it was a typo then I would have a search space of 1,000,000,000 possibilities (assuming an extra character as part of the typo, and digits only). If they’d just used someone else’s date of birth, the size is a lot lower, more so if I assume a reasonable range of years.

This is a sequel of sorts to the original Frogger arcade game from 1981 (and its many ports). Apparently due to legal issues, there weren’t many sequels until the late 90s. This version was a little earlier, but was never released (possibly for the same reason) although it is a complete game. Refreshes of early-80s arcade games are often terrible, but Frogger acquits itself remarkably well.

I’m a sucker for puzzle games, but the genre’s not well-populated on the SMS (apart from Korean MSX conversions). The Game Gear is better suited to the genre so there are more to be found. Gear Works did the rounds on home computers and some consoles back in 1993. What we have here seems to be a conversion from the Game Boy, but is it as interesting as you might hope?

There’s plenty of golf games on every platform you can think of, but I’d never played one for more than a few minutes. So, on a whim, I chose Fred Couples Golf. (Or is is Fred Couples’ Golf?) It’s a reasonably mature golf game, albeit without any attempt at 3D, and the richer colour palette of the Game Gear is likely to make for a prettier game. So, what’s it like?